'The Harrods, the Habitats and the Hooligans' - cast of the Channel 4 soap Brookside pictured on the show's set. Photograph: Photoshot/Hulton Archive

Can you do anagrams? Imagine you are hanging from the beautiful silver star in the sky? Do you want an hour of news in depth? Are you sexually liberated, socially aware and politically concerned? Do you wear leg warmers? Have you read An Ice Cream War? Do you believe in Veronyka Bodnaree?

I had by now already done my anagrams in Countdown (living with the diminishing hope of something rude turning up). I had multiplied 71 by 10 and subtracted 23 which is also part of this taxing game. I had joined in The Body Show with Yvonne Ocampo: "Imagine you are like a fountain." And all this, straight from work without a cup of coffee and my feet killing me.

Channel 4, I can see, will take a bit of living up to. Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive, says himself in TV Times, that it's entertaining, marvellous, hilarious, exciting, intelligent, gritty, provocative, thoughtful and splendidly varied. He also says in the Listener that he is not one to boast.

By their soap operas ye shall know them. Brookside is a Liverpool Knott's Landing, a private housing estate inhabited by, let's say, the Harrods, the Habitats, and a warm and lovable working class family, the Hooligans. The first episode turned on whether the Hooligans had stolen the Harrods' lavatory.

"I never nicked the bog," protests the smallest Hooligan. As the series is costing £3.5m no doubt they can run to another. This, you see, is gritty, relevant stuff from Phil Redmond, the man who gave you Grange Hill, whether you wanted it or not.

It was not a night when anyone was going to be allowed to drop off in their socks. Apart from the fine film Walter about a mentally handicapped man (for which turn without delay to Peter Fiddick) there was an Enid Blyton spoof, Five Go Mad in Dorset. The fresh-faced four and their intermittently dead dog bowled along on their bicycles bossily doing good and, I fear, irritating the nicer elements.

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